by Henry James
“But to such amounts?”
“Incredible amounts it appears. And mountains of others too. She throws herself all on our father.”
“And he has to pay them? There’s no one else?” Hugh asked.
She waited as if he might answer himself, and then as he apparently didn’t, “He’s only afraid there may be some else—that’s how she makes him do it,” she said. And “Now do you think,” she pursued, “that I don’t tell you things?”
He turned them over in his young perception and pity, the things she told him. “Oh, oh, oh!” And then, in the great place, while as, just spent by the effort of her disclosure, she moved from him again, he took them all in. “That’s the situation that, as you say, may force his hand.”
“It absolutely, I feel, does force it.” And the renewal of her appeal brought her round. “Isn’t it too lovely?”
His frank disgust answered. “It’s too damnable!”
“And it’s you,” she quite terribly smiled, “who—by the ‘irony of fate’!—have given him help.”
He smote his head in the light of it. “By the Mantovano?”
“By the possible Mantovano—as a substitute for the impossible Sir Joshua. You’ve made him aware of a value.”
“Ah, but the value’s to be fixed!”
“Then Mr. Bender will fix it!”
“Oh, but—as he himself would say—I’ll fix Mr. Bender!” Hugh declared. “And he won’t buy a pig in a poke.”
This cleared the air while they looked at each other; yet she had already asked: “What in the world can you do, and how in the world can you do it?”
Well, he was too excited for decision. “I don’t quite see now, but give me time.” And he took out his watch as already to measure it. “Oughtn’t I before I go to say a word to Lord Theign?”
“Is it your idea to become a lion in his path?”
“Well, say a cub—as that’s what I’m afraid he’ll call me! But I think I should speak to him.”
She drew a conclusion momentarily dark. “He’ll have to learn in that case that I’ve told you of my fear.”
“And is there any good reason why he shouldn’t?”
She kept her eyes on him and the darkness seemed to clear. “No!” she at last replied, and, having gone to touch an electric bell, was with him again. “But I think I’m rather sorry for you.”
“Does that represent a reason why I should be so for you?”
For a little she said nothing; but after that: “None whatever!”
“Then is the sister of whom you speak Lady Imber?”
Lady Grace, at this, raised her hand in caution: the butler had arrived, with due gravity, in answer to her ring; to whom she made known her desire. “Please say to his lordship—in the saloon or wherever—that Mr. Crimble must go.” When Banks had departed, however, accepting the responsibility of this mission, she answered her friend’s question. “The sister of whom I speak is Lady Imber.”
“She loses then so heavily at bridge?”
“She loses more than she wins.”
Hugh gazed as with interest at these oddities of the great. “And yet she still plays?”
“What else, in her set, should she do?”
This he was quite unable to say; but he could after a moment’s exhibition of the extent to which he was out of it put a question instead. “So you’re not in her set?”
“I’m not in her set.”
“Then decidedly,” he said, “I don’t want to save her. I only want—”
He was going on, but she broke in: “I know what you want!”
He kept his eyes on her till he had made sure—and this deep exchange between them had a beauty. “So you’re now with me?”
“I’m now with you!”
“Then,” said Hugh, “shake hands on it”
He offered her his hand, she took it, and their grasp became, as you would have seen in their fine young faces, a pledge in which they stood a minute locked. Lord Theign came upon them from the saloon in the midst of the process; on which they separated as with an air of its having consisted but of Hugh’s leave-taking. With some such form of mere civility, at any rate, he appeared, by the manner in which he addressed himself to Hugh, to have supposed them occupied.
“I’m sorry my daughter can’t keep you; but I must at least thank you for your interesting view of my picture.”
Hugh indulged in a brief and mute, though very grave, acknowledgment of this expression; presently speaking, however, as on a resolve taken with a sense of possibly awkward consequences: “May I—before you’re sure of your indebtedness—put you rather a straight question, Lord Theign?” It sounded doubtless, and of a sudden, a little portentous—as was in fact testified to by his lordship’s quick stiff stare, full of wonder at so free a note. But Hugh had the courage of his undertaking. “If I contribute in ny modest degree to establishing the true authorship of the work you speak of, may I have from you an assurance that my success isn’t to serve as a basis for any peril—or possibility—of its leaving the country?”
Lord Theign was visibly astonished, but had also, independently of this, turned a shade pale. “You ask of me an ‘assurance’?”
Hugh had now, with his firmness and his strained smile, quite the look of having counted the cost of his step. “I’m afraid I must, you see.”
It pressed at once in his host the spring of a very grand manner. “And pray by what right here do you do anything of the sort?”
“By the right of a person from whom you, on your side, are accepting a service.”
Hugh had clearly determined in his opponent a rise of what is called spirit. “A service that you half an hour ago thrust on me, sir—and with which you may take it from me that I’m already quite prepared to dispense.”
“I’m sorry to appear indiscreet,” our young man returned; “I’m sorry to have upset you in any way. But I can’t overcome my anxiety—”
Lord Theign took the words from his lips. “And you therefore invite me—at the end of half an hour in this house!—to account to you for my personal intentions and my private affairs and make over my freedom to your hands?”
Hugh stood there with his eyes on the black and white pavement that stretched about him—the great loz-enged marble floor that might have figured that ground of his own vision which he had made up his mind to “stand.” “I can only see the matter as I see it, and I should be ashamed not to have seized any chance to appeal to you.” Whatever difficulty he had had shyly to face didn’t exist for him now. “I entreat you to think again, to think well, before you deprive us of such a source of just envy.”
“And you regard your entreaty as helped,” Lord Theign asked, “by the beautiful threat you are so good as to attach to it?” Then as his monitor, arrested, exchanged a searching look with Lady Grace, who, showing in her face all the pain of the business, stood off at the distance to which a woman instinctively retreats when a scene turns to violence as precipitately as this one appeared to strike her as having turned: “I ask you that not less than I should like to know whom you speak of as ‘deprived’ of property that happens—for reasons that I don’t suppose you also quarrel with!—to be mine.”
“Well, I know nothing about threats, Lord Theign,” Hugh said, “but I speak of all of us—of all the people of England; who would deeply deplore such an act of alienation, and whom, for the interest they bear you, I beseech you mercifully to consider.”
“The interest they bear me?”—the master of Dedborough fairly bristled with wonder. “Pray how the devil do they show it?”
“I think they show it in all sorts of ways”—and Hugh’s critical smile, at almost any moment hovering, played over the question in a manner seeming to convey that he meant many things.
“Understand then, please,” said Lord Theign with every inch of his authority, “that they’ll show it best by minding their own business while I very particularly mind mine.”
“You simply do, in other word
s,” Hugh explicitly concluded, “what happens to be convenient to you.”
“In very distinct preference to what happens to be convenient to you! So that I need no longer detain you,” Lord Theign added with the last dryness and as if to wind up their brief and thankless connection.
The young man took his dismissal, being able to do no less, while, unsatisfied and unhappy, he looked about mechanically for the cycling-cap he had laid down somewhere in the hall on his arrival. “I apologise, my lord, if I seem to you to have ill repaid your hospitality. But,” he went on with his uncommended cheer, “my interest in your picture remains.”
Lady Grace, who had stopped and strayed and stopped again as a mere watchful witness, drew nearer hereupon, breaking her silence for the first time. “And please let me say, father, that mine also grows and grows.”
It was obvious that this parent, surprised and disconcerted by her tone, judged her contribution superfluous. “I’m happy to hear it, Grace—but yours is another affair.”
“I think on the contrary that it’s quite the same one,” she returned—”since it’s on my hint to him that Mr. Crimble has said to you what he has.” The resolution she had gathered while she awaited her chance sat in her charming eyes, which met, as she spoke, the straighter paternal glare. “I let him know that I supposed you to think of profiting by the importance of Mr. Bender’s visit.”
“Then you might have spared, my dear, your—I suppose and hope well-meant—interpretation of my mind.” Lord Theign showed himself at this point master of the beautiful art of righting himself as without having been in the wrong. “Mr. Bender’s visit will terminate—as soon as he has released Lord John—without my having profited in the smallest particular.”
Hugh meanwhile evidently but wanted to speak for his friend. “It was Lady Grace’s anxious inference, she will doubtless let me say for her, that my idea about the Moretto would add to your power—well,” he pushed on not without awkwardness, “of ‘realising’ advantageously on such a prospective rise.”
Lord Theign glanced at him as for positively the last time, but spoke to Lady Grace. “Understand then, please, that, as I detach myself from any association with this gentleman’s ideas—whether about the Moretto or about anything else—his further application of them ceases from this moment to concern us.”
The girl’s rejoinder was to address herself directly to Hugh, across their companion. “Will you make your inquiry for me then?”
The light again kindled in him. “With all the pleasure in life!” He had found his cap and, taking them together, bowed to the two, for departure, with high emphasis of form. Then he marched off in the direction from which he had entered.
Lord Theign scarce waited for his disappearance to turn in wrath to Lady Grace. “I denounce the indecency, wretched child, of your public defiance of me!”
They were separated by a wide interval now, and though at her distance she met his reproof so unshrinkingly as perhaps to justify the terms into which it had broken, she became aware of a reason for his not following it up. She pronounced in quick warning “Lord John!”—for their friend, released from among the pictures, was rejoining them, was already there.
He spoke straight to his host on coming into sight. “Bender’s at last off, but”—he indicated the direction of the garden front—”you may still find him, out yonder, prolonging the agony with Lady Sand-gate.”
Lord Theign remained a moment, and the heat of his resentment remained. He looked with a divided discretion, the pain of his indecision, from his daughter’s suitor and his approved candidate to that contumacious young woman and back again; then choosing his course in silence he had a gesture of almost desperate indifference and passed quickly out by the door to the terrace.
It had left Lord John gaping. “What on earth’s the matter with your father?”
“What on earth indeed?” Lady Grace unaidingly asked. “Is he discussing with that awful man?”
“Old Bender? Do you think him so awful?” Lord John showed surprise—which might indeed have passed for harmless amusement; but he shook everything off in view of a nearer interest. He quite waved old Bender away. “My dear girl, what do we care—?”
“I care immensely, I assure you,” she interrupted, “and I ask of you, please, to tell me!”
Her perversity, coming straight and which he had so little expected, threw him back so that he looked at her with sombre eyes. “Ah, it’s not for such a matter I’m here, Lady Grace—I’m here with that fond question of my own.” And then as she turned away, leaving him with a vehement motion of protest: “I’ve come for your kind answer—the answer your father instructed me to count on.”
“I’ve no kind answer to give you!”—she raised forbidding hands. “I entreat you to leave me alone.”
There was so high a spirit and so strong a force in it that he stared as if stricken by violence. “In God’s name then what has happened—when you almost gave me your word?”
“What has happened is that I’ve found it impossible to listen to you.” And she moved as if fleeing she scarce knew whither before him.
He had already hastened around another way, however, as to meet her in her quick circuit of the hall. “That’s all you’ve got to say to me after what has passed between us?”
He had stopped her thus, but she had also stopped him, and her passionate denial set him a limit. “I’ve got to say—sorry as I am—that if you must have an answer it’s this: that never, Lord John, never, can there be anything more between us.” And her gesture cleared her path, permitting her to achieve her flight. “Never, no, never,” she repeated as she went—”never, never, never!” She got off by the door at which she had been aiming to some retreat of her own, while aghast and defeated, left to make the best of it, he sank after a moment into a chair and remained quite pitiably staring before him, appealing to the great blank splendour.
BOOK SECOND
I
LADY SANDGATE, on a morning late in May, entered her drawing-room by the door that opened at the right of that charming retreat as a person coming in faced Bruton Street; and she met there at this moment Mr. Gotch, her butler, who had just appeared in the much wider doorway forming opposite the Bruton Street windows an apartment not less ample, lighted from the back of the house and having its independent connection with the upper floors and the lower. She showed surprise at not immediately finding the visitor to whom she had been called.
“But Mr. Crimble––?”
“Here he is, my lady.” And he made way for that gentleman, who emerged from the back room; Gotch observing the propriety of a prompt withdrawal.
“I went in for a minute, with your servant’s permission,” Hugh explained, “to see your famous Lawrence—which is splendid; he was so good as to arrange the light.” The young man’s dress was of a form less relaxed than on the occasion of his visit to Dedborough; yet the soft felt hat that he rather restlessly crumpled as he talked marked the limit of his sacrifice to vain appearances.
Lady Sandgate was at once interested in the punctuality of his reported act. “Gotch thinks as much of my grandmother as I do—and even seems to have ended by taking her for his very own.”
“One sees, unmistakably, from her beauty, that you at any rate are of her line,” Hugh allowed himself, not without confidence, the amusement of replying; “and I must make sure of another look at her when I’ve a good deal more time.”
His hostess heard him as with a lapse of hope. “You hadn’t then come for the poor dear?” And then as he obviously hadn’t, but for something quite else: “I thought, from so prompt an interest, that she might be coveted—!” It dropped with a yearning sigh.
“You imagined me sent by some prowling collector?” Hugh asked. “Ah, I shall never do their work—unless to betray them: that I shouldn’t in the least mind!—and I’m here, frankly, at this early hour, to ask your consent to my seeing Lady Grace a moment on a particular business, if she can kindly give me time.”
“You’ve known then of her being with me?”
“I’ve known of her coming to you straight on leaving Dedborough,” he explained; “of her wishing not to go to her sister’s, and of Lord Theign’s having proceeded, as they say, or being on the point of proceeding, to some foreign part.”
“And you’ve learnt it from having seen her—these three or four weeks?”
“I’ve met her—but just barely—two or three times: at a ‘private view’ at the opera, in the lobby, and that sort of thing. But she hasn’t told you?”
Lady Sandgate neither affirmed nor denied; she only turned on him her thick lustre. “I wanted to see how much you’d tell.” She waited even as for more, but this not coming she helped herself. “Once again at dinner?”